Paradox Studio Thread

[Caddo Cobgang]

I think im actually finally learning how to play Hoi4 after 400 hours lol, I was playing Kaiserredux as the SRI and managed reunify all of Italy except Sardinia when you realize its the most spreadsheet and numbercrunching game of all Paradox titles it goes from confusing as fuck to the easiest strategy game ever

Gilded Destiny, the upcoming non-Paradox grand strategy game set in the 19th century, had a new dev diary released about its population system.

In Gilded Destiny's official Discord server, a few questions have been answered related to the new dev diary.
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I never trust this kinda stuff until it actually releases but I wish them luck, Victoria 3 (like all other PDX games) are objectively terrible in terms of how they do DLC

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

Agree about Terra Invicta, i think most of us wanted just a xcom game with an interesting campaign overmap. Instead we got different systems that don't work together.
There are been quite a lot of xcom like games, but they either get the strategic map or the tactical combat wrong. For all of their faults xcom 1 and 2 were great games. Firaxis decided to make a shitty xcom and a shitty marvel game instead of either making xcom 3 or making another game with similar gameplay in a different setting. My dream game would be a mercency band in a fantasy world with xcom like gameplay, add in some RPG elements for the "base" people.

It’s basically three nested games. The first one (Globohomo Simulator) is fine, it’s accessible enough. The second one (Space Industrialization Tycoon) is where things start to go awry as you juggle it and Globohomo Simulator. Then you get Total War: Space. Except to get to Total War: Space you have to navigate a massive tech tree full of noob traps and other early game decisions that there is no way to organically figure out through trial and error because Globohomo Simulator is a full campaign in and of itself.

I think they also may have screwed up in trying to hard their Total War-like turn-based system behind the skin of real time Paradox-like. It feels awkward as hell having to manually set and babysit (and they genuinely matter to an extreme degree) agents while waiting for stuff to pop off. I think they wanted to have their cake and eat it of having a game designed around turns but still able to roll out events in real-time for the feeling of randomness and time passing, but the execution wound up being incredibly awkward.

Damn looking good. Dependables are a really cool concept. Crushing a rival country so hard you kill or maim most of their work population for the next 20 years will be very fun. I am afraid the game is going to be overshadowed by Johan's magnum opus. They will need to strategize the release date.

War of the Triple Alliance Simulator

 

[Lonjil]

Time for a cozy eu4 France game. We kill anglos in this house

 

[Snekposter]

Instead we got different systems that don't work together.

Yeah, the space gameplay where you build an interplanetary empire like something from a 4x and the Earth counselor intrigue where you fight with the other factions for control are completely at odds with one another, especially since the more successful your space empire is the less you need Earth since you've got habs for resources, money, research, and even mission control. And if the aliens are starting to take the place over that's what nuclear barrages and nose-mounted green lasers are for considering how tough alien armies are. To make matters worse, once you get counselors in space managing them is a fucking mess since you can't just assign them to do a mission somewhere and have them get there on their own. No no, you need to send them to an orbital hab of yours (which is one mission phase), load them onto a ship that's docked (another mission phase), then launch the ship and have it go somewhere, and then its going to be another mission phase once they arrive to get them off the ship.

 

[Lonjil]

Forgive me if I am very late and every one has talked about this already, but Stellaris has felt incredibly broken this past few weeks to the point I find it unplayable. I noticed last night during my megacorp campaign that the ai just does not build buildings or districts anymore on their planets, so my branches never truly scale in value because their planets just fall to crime and revolts. Because of this bug or gameplay issue, I feel like megacorps are basically beyond useless.

Anyone else running into something similar?

 

[Blackstar]

Forgive me if I am very late and every one has talked about this already, but Stellaris has felt incredibly broken this past few weeks to the point I find it unplayable. I noticed last night during my megacorp campaign that the ai just does not build buildings or districts anymore on their planets, so my branches never truly scale in value because their planets just fall to crime and revolts. Because of this bug or gameplay issue, I feel like megacorps are basically beyond useless.

Anyone else running into something similar?

The latest expansion fucked the game up hard and it's been hotfix-mania ever since.

 

[Lonjil]

The latest expansion fucked the game up hard and it's been hotfix-mania ever since.

That explains it lol thanks. It was so bad it felt like the game was back into an alpha state almost. Why must they constantly ruin shit

 

[Slap47]

I think the most frustrating thing about Paradox's AI is its inability to set proper priorities. This works in both directions. Its very easy to "Game" the AI, especially in crusader Kings 3. You might only have an army of 800 dudes against their combined alliance of 5,000. But you also know that once they start an 18 month siege of your capital you can swoop down with your 800 and start a 9 month siege of theirs. Now, you would think given the danger of this the first thing they will do is realize 9<18 and immediately pull off the siege of your capital and go after you. But no. They don't. So you siege down their capital, capture the leader, and boom, your 800 dudes just won a war against a massive coalition of great powers.

Honestly, if they made the AI actually good most people would get upset and stop playing.

 

[mindlessobserver]

That explains it lol thanks. It was so bad it felt like the game was back into an alpha state almost. Why must they constantly ruin shit

My good sir, I know you paid 20 dollars for the base game and 60 dollars for 4 essential expansions. But now here is more content that will break the game to support this brand new 20 dollar expansion that will give all sorts of cool things for the AI to do (that you won't unless you get the expansion) and make it impossible to do multi-player (unless you get the expansion).

Did we mention the new expansion will break the game?

 

[Stoneheart]

But now here is more content that will break the game to support this brand new 20 dollar expansion that will give all sorts of cool things for the AI to do (that you won't unless you get the expansion) and make it impossible to do multi-player (unless you get the expansion).

when did they change that only the host needs the dlc?
also the worst part about new "features" is the orphan content.
HOi4 has alot of different power struggle systems and they all suck and break the game if they feel like it...
US Congress,chinese power struggle, wehrmacht vs SS, army vs Navy in Japan, what ever goes on in spain, what ever goes on in turkey, the finish system, base game political system, base game stability system in france and i bet i missed a couple.
they are all different and all shit.

 

[enaR]

Honestly, if they made the AI actually good most people would get upset and stop playing.

Annoying war AI I can see, especially in games like EU4 where they can identify daily opportunities that would be very tedious for a player to find. They need to be able to keep up in development, though, so they can remain a challenge without war. And in Vic 3 this is especially important because the AI's ability to develop determines how much demand there is on the world market to buy your stuff.

 

[Slap47]

Did we mention the new expansion will break the game?

Stellaris is a game I have had alot of fun with, but updates so fundamentally change the game that it basically a brand new game every few major patches. They may as well have just released Stellaris 2 or even 3 at this point.

 

[Lonjil]

but updates so fundamentally change the game that it basically a brand new game every few major patches

The constant overhauls that change basic aspects of the game has really soured me on the game. It feels like every 2-3 months everything is broken again, and everything is different

 

[WarrenZHarding]

Stellaris was my first "real" Pdx game (First one overall was Sengoku), so I have a soft spot for it. My disappointment at how bad they've fucked it up, and my absolute indifference to CK3's chink dlc has finally snapped me out of being nigger cattle for Pdx. They want my money again, they need to prove they are capable of putting out quality products.

 

[Blackstar]

Lol Stellaris now has a bug where Frigates upgrade into Deep Space Citadels

 

[Lonjil]

Lol Stellaris now has a bug where Frigates upgrade into Deep Space Citadels

How do they continually break this game

 

[WarrenZHarding]

What do we get first? Stellaris back in a functional state, or the Epstein list?

 

[Mound Dweller]

What do we get first? Stellaris back in a functional state, or the Epstein list?

Way thing are looking mate it's a tossup between a 1.0 release of Yandere Simulator and Heat Death of the Universe before we get either of those.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

I have been brooding over how nobody has been able to pull off what Crusader Kings II did with characters. Especially as I play State of Decay (which came out around the same time).

I think what really makes CK2 work is some combination of:
1) (Very important) Characters are playing the game too
1a) They're gunning for your job
2) You need the characters
3) They have enough flexibility and abstractness that you can read more characterization into them

A lot of shitty games have tried to do these procedurally-generated character-driven games in everything from 4X to zombie survival to whaling, and it doesn't work because the people amount to little more than lifeless equipment (bundles of stats) that maybe sometimes spawn an event for your eyes to glaze over. CK2 characters are so alive that the game can play itself without you. They may potentially have their own events, mechanics or other stuff going on underneath the hood, but you know that most of it is the same, and they have agendas that may or may not collide with yours, and you get emergent gameplay resulting from the collision of different people's decisions, and you can't just ignore or play around them.

Nobody has done this properly since and I'm starting to suspect nobody will.

 

[Computer God Autism]

Nobody has done this properly since and I'm starting to suspect nobody will.

If Koei stopped trying to reinvent the wheel and actually started iterating on what worked they very easily could. They were the pioneers of character driven strategy games and RotK and Nobunaga's Ambition are still going but get hamstrung every time by them trying to fundamentally rework a basic features to justify a new game instead of just iterating on the good ideas they had.

I will add another point to your list too; your character getting usurped/killed by another character isn't the end of the game. A lot of the games that *try* character/procedual storytelling-driven gameplay have your character losing as a defeat condition. In CK2 you can lose your primary title or best character due to any number of reasons, sometimes wind up in a more advantageous strategic position for it, and then easily rebound. There's much less pressure to feel like you have to stop the AI from playing the game because of that.